The disclosure relates generally to a workflow system and method therefor, and more particularly, to a workflow system that is triggered by documents delivered by a document notification and delivery service.
Generally, there exists an increasing amount of information contained in electronic documents available from numerous heterogeneous, widely distributed sources. Keeping up to date with recently published material relevant to a particular topic is a challenge. Document Notification and Delivery Services (DNDS) aim to facilitate this task by providing notification and delivery services for documents concerning specified subjects.
An example of a document notification and delivery service is Yaka that is described in the following publications which are incorporated herein by reference: Damian Arregui, Francois Pacull, Jutta Willamowski, “Yaka: Document Notification and Delivery Across Heterogeneous Document Repositories”, in Proceedings of CRIWG 2001, Darmstadt, Germany, Sep. 6-8, 2001; and European Patent Application EP 1111518 A1, entitled “System And Method For Document Notification And Delivery Across Heterogeneous Document Repositories”.
As described in the publications, Yaka applies a four step solution that involves document detection, processing, notification, and delivery. More specifically, Yaka detects new documents published in each information source. It performs a first level of relevance filtering based on the document's properties (e.g., keywords, location, type, correlation with sample documents, etc.). Yaka then processes information by extracting meta-information (e.g. summary, language, authors, etc.) from the documents, sometimes using complementary linguistic services. Yaka subsequently sends notification e-mail containing the document meta-information to all interested users (i.e., subscribers). Finally, Yaka delivers on demand document content to the requesting users by transforming the document into the appropriate format depending on the selected delivery medium (e.g. e-mail, printer, PDA).
The concept of subjects is central to Yaka. Subjects act as distribution channels for documents relevant to a particular topic. A subject can be seen as a collection of views on different information sources. In order to fine-tune the subject definitions, Yaka allows filters to be defined on top of the information sources. Once a subject is defined, users can subscribe to it. When subscribing to a subject each user defines subject related preferences. In defining a subject related preference, the user also specifies a preferred delivery media and a preferred notification and delivery scheme. Then Yaka notifies the user of newly published documents. Upon receipt of a document notification, the user can request document delivery.
In addition, there exist document-centered workflow management systems (WFMS) for defining, managing, and executing workflow processes containing sets of interrelated tasks, which produce and consume documents. The WFMS handles and distributes these documents to users, assigned to complete tasks associated with the documents, according to a predefined process description. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,493,731 and 6,505,219, which are incorporated herein by reference, are examples of a WFMS in which process descriptions describe the flow of work and responsibility of tasks defining a process description. A task is completed when the person responsible for the task prepares a task document. The process description completes when the final task in the process description is completed.
The aforementioned systems, however, are not integrated and do not readily allow flexibility of design. For example, they do not allow exceptions of a workflow system to be easily managed. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system that solves these and other problems.